Gil Hardwick
From BoyWiki
Gil Hardwick is an Australian anthropologist, novelist and film-maker; author of several boy related coming-of-age novels and screenplays as well as a range of academic papers and nonfiction titles.
Gil Hardwick graduated with Honours in Anthropology from the University of Western Australia in 1989, majoring in Aboriginal Studies, followed by 3+ years with the Center for Irish Studies, Murdoch University. Graduated again with Honors in Literature, UWA Centre for English and Cultural Studies 2011, and Masters in Criminal Justice with the Center for Crime Research, UWA Law Faculty 2014. [1]
His academic qualifications, professional expertise and research interests include sex, gender and sexuality; relations between children and adults; childhood sexuality, puberty and development risk; childhood criminogenic duress pathways and coming-of-age dysfunction especially among exceptional individuals set aside by mainstream modernity, and fringe and marginal populations.
Publications
- Nirvana. Published by eNovella Australia 2014. The sequel to 'Sit Down Time'; inspired in part by Gottfried Keller's classic, 'Green Henry', 'Nirvana' is listed by the Australian National Library as Australian bildungsromans, being the adolescent formation tale of the stubborn, sensitive, highly gifted musician Alan Cameron. ISBN 978-0-9923704-7-3.
- Sit Down Time. Published by eNovella Australia 2014. Written for a friend who as a teenager lost his father to suicide, this story is about grief and healing in the midst of precocious puberty. ISBN 978-0-9923704-5-9.
- Food Bowl. Published by eNovella Australia 2014. The far distant future beyond 2150, beyond the climate apocalypse, beyond dystopian aftershock, in a decayed world stagnating from boredom and corruption, far out beyond civilisation the Crop Masters work incessantly to maintain food supplies, precocious children coming-of-age change the world. ISBN 978-0-9923704-3-5.
- A Somewhat Different Life. Published by Crusader eBooks 2013. This stunning sequel to 'Educating Nicolas' probes beneath appearances to explore underlying sexual realities in the lives of Australian boys. Highly erotic yet at once intensely heart-moving, it traces the career of Jim Harris, a social historian afflicted with a lone, detached writer’s mind and a kind heart. ISBN 978-0-9875537-8-2.
- Educating Nicolas. Published by Crusader eBooks 2011. The story of a small town boy suffering the double disadvantage of being too handsome and far too intelligent. He is abused, raped, bullied and neglected, diagnosed as autistic, until Wally, a funny, eccentric old man with a speech impediment gives him a lift home after school, and changes his life. ISBN 978-0-9872987-2-0.
- The Boy Runners and the Deargbeithíoch. Published by Crusader eBooks 2013. In this young adult neopagan supernatural fantasy rewrite of Edmund Spenser’s Elizabethan poem 'The Faerie Queene', nine young Irish boys in 11th Century Leinster were made precocious through elven magic, and trained as courtly message runners. ISBN 978-0-9872987-7-5
- PodWarp. Published by Crusader eBooks 2012. The three-part Podwarp series is a coming-of-age story about a great techno-dystopian city enclosed in an energy shield, in contrast with the rough outside life of gaucho villagers who work to feed the place. One podling boy, solxv98fg6, nicknamed Sola, learns to turn his brain implant down and assert his own thoughts. He forgets to log into the System and the Pod thinks he’s been processed. ISBN 978-0-9872987-5-1
- The Hunt for Barney. Published by Crusader eBooks 2012. A short fun-fantasy of a boy being hunted by the Egyptian God Anubis and his baying hounds while out skateboarding, until aided by winged Horus he escapes through a violent cyclone and wins his bet.
- Outbound. Published by Crusader eBooks 2012. A strange white boy arrives suddenly in a remote outback community, driving an old truck with a dead body in the back and a fortune in gems stashed under the chassis. ISBN 978-0-9872987-1-3
- The Inheritor. Published by Crusader eBooks 2012. The tale of a shy, dreamy 12 year-old who suddenly discovers that he is heir to a vast outback cattle empire. ISBN 978-0-9872987-0-6
Academic Thesis
- Reimagining the Rascal: Boyhood subjection in Xavier Herbert's 'Poor Fellow My Country' and Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Honours dissertation, English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia 2011. The selected texts are both focused on boys coming of age against explicitly detailed backgrounds of boyhood and pubescent nudity, frontier instability and violence. How are disaffiliated boyhoods subjected to ambiguous and often capricious rules and conditions of the frontier environment explored in these works?
Non-boy Related Nonfiction Publications
- Economically Useful Plants for Northern Australia. Published by Crusader eBooks 2012.
- An Easy Guide to Making Leather at Home. Published by Crusader eBooks 2012.
- Castle Dangerous: The Alfred Pickmore Bussell Estate, Margaret River, Western Australia. Hesperian Press 2003. ISBN 978-0-8590532-2-8
